Facebook Fan Page Marketing, Part 1

As Facebook membership continues to grow, more and more businesses are realising the power of social networking and its potential to connect with customers on a more intimate and personal level. Research from Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business shows that Facebook fan pages offer an effective and low-cost method of social media marketing. Just like Kayleigh commented on her earlier post about Facebook advertising, Facebook is becoming the next generation marketing platform. In this article, I am going to introduce an essential part of Facebook’s marketing ecosystem: the Facebook Fan Page.  Next week in part 2, I will show you how to track your visitors’ behavior on Facebook and how to use Google Analytics to track your Facebook Fan pages.

About Facebook Fan Pages

A Facebook Fan Page is a public profile on Facebook which anyone can access and Facebook users can easily share. It forms the skeleton of a company’s presence on Facebook. Within the pages are a series of tabs with default tabs as well as customisation opportunities.

How a Facebook Fan Page Can Help Your Business

Facebook is a social network, not a shopping network. Why do so many companies spend resources establishing and maintaining a Fan Page on Facebook?

• It is a great way to drive traffic to your website. Facebook is one of the top social networks in the world, and they have huge number of members. According to statistics from Facebook officials, the site has more than 400 million active users and half of them log on to Facebook in any given day. Meanwhile, unlike Facebook’s personal profiles, Facebook Fan Pages are public-facing, and people need not be logged into Facebook to visit them. Redirecting even a small portion of Facebook’s huge amount of daily traffic to your website could significantly improve the amount of qualified traffic on your website.
• It increases the efficiency of social media campaigns. One of the greatest features of fan pages is that whenever you send updates or announce events your followers will receive the information in their news feed automatically.
• It arguably improves the natural search ranking for your website. By publishing the backlinks to your business’s page as well as having Facebook Fan Page with your name in the title, your business will receive some bonus points in the SEO department. It is negligible whether the links contain much value as they are strictly tagged with “no follow” although how much that hinders the actual link authority being passed on is still debated.

How to Create a Customised Fan Page

Sure, anyone can build a Facebook Fan Page in 10 minutes. But if you want more people to get involved in your page and help your business benefit from it, a customised Fan Page is essential. Here is a fantastic example created by the Kaplan School. It not only introduces their business on Facebook, but also has many call-to-actions encouraging Facebook users to visit their site or purchase their service.

In order to create an attractive personalised fan page, you’ll need the applications static FBML and FBJS.

• FBML (Facebook Makeup Language) is an application created by Facebook. It will add a tab to the fan page which you can use HTML or FMBL to design. For example, the Facebook Like button is formatted like: <FB:like></FB:like>
• FBJS is Facebook JavaScript, which provides the functionality you need to develop a customised fan page. It is a solution for those who want to use JavaScript in the application. Most methods and JavaScript Objects are the same as normal, but some properties like parentNode have been redefined as a couple of getters and setters.

You can find more details and more examples about FBML and FBJS in Facebook Docs (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/).